Tour de France stage 3: Cycling through 'a slice of paradise'

Nicholas Crane gets a head start on the Tour de France route from Cambridge to
London through some of England’s most peaceful and remote countryside

It’s so early on a Sunday morning that it feels as if we’re pedalling through a beautifully lit movie set before the stars are called. Polygons of sun are projected on to honey-coloured walls and the streets of Cambridge are so silent that the hum of our bike tyres seems intrusive. At the Round Church we take a sharp left past St John’s College and Trinity, and across the cobbles of King’s Parade. The air is cold and I keep a lookout for a cast-aside newspaper to stuff up the front of my cycling jersey.

On July 7, a multicoloured cavalcade of 198 professional racing cyclists and a carnival of team vehicles will squeeze through these narrow streets at the start of stage three of the 101st edition of the world’s most magnificent bicycle race, the Tour de France.

For only the third time, the race is passing through England. This year, it actually starts in England. Stage one of the 2014 tour rolls away from Leeds on July 5 and takes a 118-mile loop through the Yorkshire Dales to Harrogate; on the following day, the 22 teams of nine riders tackle a 124-mile Pennine roller-coaster from York to Sheffield. On the third day, the English section of this year’s tour will reach its climax by careering through the home counties from Cambridge to London; 99 miles from dreaming spires to gleaming towers. After London, the tour heads to the Continent for another 18 stages and the finish in Paris on July 27.

Today, though, we’re a peloton of two, following stage three from Cambridge to London. We’re not racing but trying to arrive. It’s a long time since I pedalled 100 miles in a day, and for Kit, my son, it will be a first. The Fitzwilliam Museum slips by, a Parthenon in the Fens, and then the Botanic Garden. In July, these streets will be packed; a typical tour draws 12 million spectators along its route. Suddenly we’re out of Cambridge.

We’ve started early because there is nothing as intoxicating as the open road saturated with birdsong, breeze and cherry blossom. We glide through Great Shelford, still sleeping. The village takes its name from “ford at a shallow place”. There is time on a bike to think about the poetry and incongruities of England’s signposts. On the empty A-road the miles flick by. Sunrise on a Sunday floods the countryside with forgotten tranquillity. Everything about this landscape is gentle and ancient. Chalk country caught the eye of the first hunter-gatherers, stalking the grasslands for horned aurochs. Flint arrowheads lie out there beneath the pale soil. We pass the turn to Great Chesterford, where a walled town once stood beside the river and where a Roman mosaic was found buried, and cross the old Roman road into Essex.

For the peloton, the descent into Saffron Walden will be a breakneck swoop with eyes on the bend at the bottom. Then there is a short climb past the 16th-century timbers of 1 Myddylton Place followed by a 90-degree turn into George Street. A momentary lapse of concentration here is likely to leave skin and Lycra smeared on the tarmac.

We talk about this over breakfast in a coffee shop. It’s a pity for the riders that they won’t have time to pedal around town appreciating Saffron Walden’s 1,000 years of architecture. Long before the Tour de France was conceived, a more militaristic bunch of Gallic visitors was responsible for turning this small Saxon settlement into a fortified market town. The ruins of the Norman castle are at the top of Common Hill and the basic street layout around the upper part of town follows the outlines of the Norman defences. Later, many of the houses in town were decorated with plastered patterns, or pargetting. The two figures on the façade of the Sun Inn probably date back to the 17th century and show a local carter killing a giant with an axle in what appears to be one of the earliest records of road rage.

The writer' son (photo: Nicholas Crane)

The road east from Walden is B-road bliss: a fast, swooping, swerving ribbon uncurling through billowing fields all the way to the most beautiful village in Essex. Finchingfield has almost everything: a village green, a mirrored duck pond beside a humpback bridge, and cottages with pastel walls and crooked, red-tiled roofs. Above the green is a church with a tower as solid as a Norman keep, built by Normans. Naturally, there’s an old inn and, next door, a tea room called Bosworths that serves full English breakfasts – and for slower cyclists, afternoon teas. Finchingfield even has its own, immaculate, white-painted post mill constructed over a century before the bicycle was invented. Little of this will register on the peloton as it plummets down the hill towards the pond, because the cyclists will suddenly see a dinky little bridge shaped like a ski jump that is barely wide enough for one vehicle, let alone 200 hurtling riders.

Finchingfield, "the most beautiful village in Essex" (Alamy)

Back on the delightful B1053 we cycle southward to the aptly named valley of the Pant, where stage three suddenly becomes adventurous. Tour followers have grown up with helicopter tracking shots of breakaways on Alpine passes, heroic battles on the merciless Ventoux, and the peloton squirming through limestone gorges or fighting sidewinds on endless plains. In Essex, once they’ve crossed the Pant, they will be confronted by a fiendish maze of narrow, kinking, country back roads. It’s a land of thatch and hedgerow, and it’s beautiful. The benevolent wind (I’d checked the forecast) pushes us along to the song of fretting skylarks.

One of the reasons I love long day-rides in England is the frequency of delectable-looking pubs and tea rooms. In the quiet village of Rayne, we round a corner and find a disused railway station selling gourmet sandwiches, cakes and home-made scones the size of cottages. It turns out that one of the two proprietors, Josh Meehan, is a professional chef. Rayne has no railway line these days, but the old track bed is now the Flitch Way and the station is a popular pit stop for cyclists and walkers. On July 7, when the tour blasts trough Rayne, Josh and his partner Grace will provide a marquee, an all-day music festival, street food and lashings of Coggeshall Gold.

Maybe it’s the scones. Or maybe I’m not very good at reading maps. But beyond a hamlet called Shellow Bowells, we get lost. To save weight, I’d taken scissors to our Ordnance Survey map, and cut away all of Essex except the narrow strip showing stage three of the tour. Unfortunately, this gram-reduction programme meant most of the places on the signposts were untraceable. And by now the tour is so deep into rural Essex that GPS is an urban memory. This part of the county is a labyrinth of lanes connecting a cluster of villages known as “The Rodings”. It’s enchanting, and on a bike with 70 or so miles in your legs, it feels surprisingly remote. There are lots of Rodings: High Roding, Aythorpe Roding, White Roding, Margaret Roding, Abbess Roding, Leaden Roding… We ride them all. Or nearly all. Unbelievably, in the midst of so many Rodings is a village called Matching. It feels as if we’ve ridden into a riddle.

The cyclists pause en route to London (photo: Kit Crane)

This unintentional rustic detour ends very suddenly at the vehicular nightmare of North Weald Bassett. Now, if you’re reading this and thinking of pedalling stage three one sunny Sunday, I’d urge you to consider bailing out at this point. From North Weald Bassett to the finish line in the Mall, the Tour route is tumultuous rather than tranquil. A lot of heavy traffic is involved. Tour-fever (and the urge to clock up 100 miles) means that we carry on, across Epping Forest to a cake-shop in Epping High Street, down to Walthamstow and Orient Way, where we pick up a cycle path that whisks us past the Eurostar engineering depot to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

About the only advantage in using an out-of-date A-Z map to navigate through Stratford is the weird and rather wonderful sensation of travelling in the future; if you treat your old map as reality, modern east London becomes a fantastical world, and there is nowhere in the capital more other-worldly than the Olympic Park, with its futuristic arenas, rescued landscapes, bikeways, immaculate river and vertical Olympic “village”.

By the time the tour racers peel away into West Ham Lane, they will be jockeying for sprint positions. Through the sun-drenched streets of Plaistow we pedal to Beckton and the docks, then west along the Thames, across the Isle of Dogs, past the Tower of London and along the Embankment. Our roads are deserted because the London Marathon is just staggering to a conclusion. By the time we wheel past Buckingham Palace into the Mall, dusk is falling and the spectator-barriers are being stacked. We’ve taken 12 hours 20 minutes to ride from Cambridge to central London. When the Tour de France cyclists race the same roads, they will do it in under four hours – and they probably won’t get lost. Or consume more calories than they burn. Or feel they’ve cycled through a slice of paradise.